According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 70 percent of all jobs are found through networking, so what happens if you’ve spent most of or maybe your entire adult life in the military and have no civilian network?

More than 130,000 soldiers a year exit the Army through Fort Knox’s Transition Assistance Program. Where Opportunity Knox, a regional initiative seeking to connect these transitioning veterans and their spouses to jobs in the Greater Louisville region, announced this week the launch of its Veteran Network Builder program to help veterans create civilian networks.

Veteran Network Builders are people in a variety of industries who are willing to connect job-seeking veterans to their network and to introduce them to city leaders. VNBs are volunteers and will work with at least three people a year. Twenty VNBs have already brought on board.

Eileen Pickett, economic development advisor to Where Opportunity Knox, said, “Often veterans and their spouses are well-suited for [local]positions but they lack personal connections and a professional civilian network to alert them to these opportunities. By establishing and enlisting Veteran Network Builders from throughout our community, we hope to assist veterans and their spouses as they start to build their civilian networks and relationships, connecting them with influencers and decision-makers in the business community.”

Make no mistake, the cooperative is very much a result of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, and says so on its website:

“With passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010, Kentucky Health Cooperative is pursuing its goal of securing access to high quality, inexpensive health insurance for the sizeable number of uninsured Kentuckians and persons working for small companies.”

This news comes from the co-op to the public via a Dec. 12 press release.

In practical terms, the board nominations point to the fact that the cooperative sees a future for itself and is proceeding with plans to transition from a formation board to an operational board of directors, in which all board members are elected by co-op members.

Currently the election is open, and the two nominees with the most votes will fill the new board of director posts. The votes are due by Dec. 24.